The Most Shallow Quote Ever + Some Context

From noted feminist theorist Elle Macpherson:

Q: How important is fashion in our world today?

A; What’s really important is our health, our family, our well-being. Fashion is not important. But if we can feel creative by putting together certain outfits that make us feel good about ourselves, well, that’s a way of expressing ourselves and that’s very important.

The Globe and Mail occasionally encloses magazines with the newspaper. We don’t ask for them, but they come. They’re all sort of knock offs of other magazines. This quote was from Sir: Canada’s International Magazine of Style for Him, Volume 1, #1. I found it in our bathroom (where Carrie usually deposits said magazines), started reading it while, well, you know, and then took it to bed with me as some light reading while I fell asleep.

I’d like to say I’m above it all, but I’m not. We work in a much better-dressed department than any we’ve been in (though Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at Minnesota produced some very smartly dressed black-clothes-and-theory-glasses-wearing grad students while we were there in the late 80s and early 90s). Will Straw tells us that he thinks Canadian academics just dress a little better than their American counterparts. Maybe so. Maybe it’s a Montreal thing. I don’t know. But rather than ignoring the magazine, I read it. I’ve got a reading on fashion in my repetition seminar and did a bunch of other readings on the topic this summer in preparation for the course. I guess it’s on my mind.

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In other news, the first half of that co-edited double issue of Social Epistemology is out. I am a bit embarassed by the intro that I co-wrote with Joan Leach, not because of what we said — I stand behind that 100% and it was awesome to work with Joan on the project. But the intro’s in desperate need of a copyedit. Hopefully, the content will outweigh the form. That’s the thing about Taylor and Francis — they’re not the kind of press that will save authors from themselves (ie, invest any money in copyediting). Ah well, everyone seems to have their publishing war story of this sort. I still remember when I was at Illinois and James Hay got his copy of The Audience and Its Landscape, which he coedited. He’d written a loving dedication at the top of his essay, and somehow it got smushed into his article. That was just sad.

I spent several hours today (1) on Intermedia for Bad Subjects and that should be out soon, too. The advantage of web publishing is that you can hide your mistakes once you find them. Like I occasionally do on this blog.

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1. Every Sunday I hope to spend the whole day doing nothing but sit in front of the TV and watch football, and every Sunday, I wind up working with the TV on all day.

Shit, Meet the Fan

http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/news/story.cfm?type=News%20Feature

I have occasionally deferred answers to questions in this space about my leaving Pitt in 2004. No doubt, this article clarifies a little but not a lot. It’s also a big step for me personally. I decided that it was better to do the right thing and risk pissing off a lot of people than to stand by and do nothing.

I’m going back next week for a defense. Zack Furness, my final Pitt advisee, who wrote a wonderful dissertation about biketevism. Whatever else can be said about the department climate or the administration, there are still a lot of great students there.

Secret Blog

One reason why I have been blogging less lately — besides travel and the fact that September appears to be the Devil’s Month at McGill (as February was at my last job) — is that my move to administration, while taking up some time, doesn’t make for interesting blogging. And when it does make for interesting writing, I can’t write about it under my own name in public. OH THE DILEMMA! Nick suggested, the other night, that I start a second, secret blog. Except this would have no point since I like to write back and forth with my friends, who are probably the vast majority of my paltry readership here. Plus, I’d get in trouble for saying stuff. Sooooo, once again we are confronted with the limits of this medium. But I’ll try and be more prolific from here on out.

It is also letter of recommendation season, which is doubly acute because of the hustling around fellowships that goes on up here. I have already written a bazillion letters and as my departmental administrator looked on in horror (1) as I lifted about 50 envelopes out of the box, I told her I’d be back for more in a relatively short timeframe. But I write not to complain about the load but to extol the virtues of my students. I’m wriiting for an unprecedentedly large number of people this year, and they’re all DOING SUCH COOL STUFF. Writing the letters is a big ongoing task, but goddamn I’ve got some good students. Which makes it much easier to do.

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In other news, it’s football season again and yes I am paying attention, though not as much as I’d like. It is also Fantasy Football season. For those of you who don’t know this unique enjoyment, groups of people get together and “draft” “teams” which consist of players from around the league. You then assemble a starting lineup each week, “play” another team and whoever’s players score the most points wins the “game.” In different leagues, players get scored differently, but the principle is the same, and it usually means that you can play the odds a bit if you know how the scoring works (for instance, in a league that counts a lot for yardage a kick returner may be more valuable than some running backs).

Anyway, this year Carrie and I share two teams (in 2 different leagues). For one team, which we named Chats Radioactifs (they’re sort of dangerous, right?), we had a live draft online where we carefully selected our players and built our strategy. For the other, which we named the Deterritorializers (c’mon, Deleuze and Guattari say it can be a dangerous process and anyway it’s an academic league), we had a team automatically selected for us by the computer. With both, once the season started, we added and dropped players and made lineup changes as necessary. The result? Both teams 2-2, with the Deterritorializers actually in 2nd place for points scored in the league (just a couple unfortunate matchups where we scored the 2nd most points in a week only to be beaten by the team that scored the most points). This would seem to suggest that strategy doesn’t matter than much, though it may also simply suggest that we do not know what we are doing.

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1. Actually, come to think of it, she’s always horrified at my utilization of resources, but this appears to simply be a quirk of her personality, rather than a reflection on my actual use of resources which is quite reasonable.

Raves

first of all, I am absolutely and completely in love with this Besnard Lakes CD and am sorry I had to miss them in pop montreal while I was in Durham, but that happens. I am especially fond of a song called Thomasina that compresses just so in my headphones or on my earbuds. Interestingly, it’s not as amazing through speakers, though it’s still quite good. I’m also grooving on a new jazz CD by The Very Tall Band which is just jazz performed in what I’d call the canonical fashion, but I’ve been listening to it a lot lately.

Also, I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about hockey. A colleague (okay, I think he’s out: DARIN BARNEY) bought a package of tickets and we got a couple games off him. We went and saw the Canadiens play the Maple Leafs at Molson Centre. It was only a preseason game, so by the end it was our backups vs. theirs, but let me tell you, people in this town really, I mean really. hate. the Maple Leafs. The whole place was electric and there were lots of anti-Leaf chants. They especially hate Eric Lindros, who refused to play for the Quebec Nordiques (back when there was such a team(1)) because he didn’t want to speak French and live in Quebec City. The crowd booed him every time he touched the puck. We booed him too. Asshole.

Also, apparently the stadium has a special family friendly section but the view is really bad, which makes sense since the section we sat is was definitely not family friendly but the view was great; we were practically peering over the rink — we were in the front row of the upper deck. I think we were seated ahead of some drunk McGill freshmen and wow, we heard about the hot chick this guy was text messaging, how he was from Vancouver, how he dropped French in 8th grade because he was getting a bad grade and you know Spanish is more useful (I think he might have gotten some evil looks, though, because by 3rd period he was going on just as loudly about how important it is to learn French), how his dad thinks he shouldn’t be spending his money frivolously, etc. His friends were all mellow and seemed to humour him (they were Canadians, after all). A few rows behind him, there was an even more drunk Quebecois guy who was silent for the first period but then screamed, and I mean screamed incoherent obscenities in both languages at unpredictable times. It sounds bad but it was really funny.

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Two new blogs popped up on my radar this week. One is by Aaron Shuman, whom you may remember as the guy who went to jail for protesting the School of the Americas. Turns out he’s a Dolphins fan. Who knew? Most of Aaron’s stuff is related to his journalism and activism (which are themselves related) though I think we’ll wind up with a slice of his life as well.

The other blog is by Ted Striphas and is also about his life (whose blog isn’t?) but has a more academic bent.

One of these days I will get a blogroll up and running along with a gazillion other improvements — but not just yet.

Post-Hoc Edit

One other cool thing happened yesterday: I got a thankyou note from a former undergrad for a letter of rec I wrote, good lord, well over a year ago. It was a “to whom it may concern” and eventually, she landed a good job in the “real world.” I suspect my letter had nothing to do with it, but I’m happy for her.

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1. I am starting to get annoyed that professional sports teams leave Quebec and start winning.

A Week Later. . .

. . .I have returned to Montreal and undertaken the long and complex process of reducing the huge piles of paper (and bits) awaiting me. But I write not to complain about impending fellowship deadlines. Rather, I write to extoll the virtues of the podcasting conference.

It was an unusual conference for me, since it combined media studies people with lawyers, podcasters and corporate people. The result? I actually learned a great deal. There’s no question that there were some fundamental disagreements among the presenters; for instance, the guy from audible.com argued that the most important thing for corporations was to do was to control content, whereas I argued that we should do everything we can to prevent that from happening. But it was great to hear how the corporate people planned to “monetize” podcasting, and how people had actually gotten their shows up and running. Though the conference swelled well past the size where you could do a proper hands-on session, I did get a really good sense of what people were actually doing with their own podcasts and how their studios were set up.

The conference itself should be available online sometime soon.

It also got me thinking: I’ve got this home studio that absolutely kills most podcasting studios. I could easily start doing something myself. And while this blog is all over the place, I even have a decent idea for the radio show: make it almost entirely consist of interviews with other academics. I mean, I go to all these conferences and meet interesting people and have interesting conversations, why not get people to talk about their work? I could throw in some other stuff here and there as I do it. Definitely not going to happen before I get that lo-boy CD done (I also have a new gear/software moratorium until that’s done), but maybe later in the fall or in the new year. I’m thinking about once a month. And of course, I’ll have to get some kind of RSS setup running before I do it.

In the short term, I’ll be recording a t-minute position paper I was going to give at AoIR this coming weekend, but since I’m now unable to go, I promised I’d send an mp3. Maybe I’ll post it here, too.

Oh, that should be the last time this blog refers to something called a podcast. From here on out, it’s just called a radio show.

Special bonus: after the conference, I went and guest-lectured in Tim Lenoir’s new media seminar. It’s always weird to teach my own work (though half the readers were from Kittler, which makes the whole thing weirder), but the lecture was actually a joy to give — I so rarely repeat lectures in graduate seminars, and yet for this one I was able to cut and paste parts of two older lectures and it seemed to work. Fresh to them, easy for me. It felt like cheating.

Other topics I hope to blog about sometime soon:
–why TV is better than movies
–various TV shows that have premiered
–everything else that’s going on

but one entry at a time.